By Hung LeHong and Jackie Fenn
Gartner, Inc.
Imagine a trip to the movie theater in the future. When you enter, you unlock your smart phone with facial recognition, purchase tickets by stating your name to the clerk, swipe a tag at the entrance that sets your phone to “silent” for the duration of the movie, and listen to a talk by the film’s director who appears holographically at the front of the room.
Most of the technologies necessary to enact this scenario are available and charted on Gartner’s 2012 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technology.
t” technologies that still need to mature for several compelling scenarios to take off.
Each year, Gartner’s Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle helps businesses understand which emerging and embryonic trends they should examine for competitive advantage. While fast movers from 2011 include media tablets, Big Data, 3D printing, cloud computing, and near field communications (NFC); this year’s trends are tempered by those technologies in each potential scenario that have yet to reach their tipping point. Sure, our phones are smarter, mobile payments are possible, and 3D-printed toys might loom on the horizon; but for widespread adoption to be possible the technologies must progress through the hype cycle to the plateau of productivity, where performance and value are predictable.
